The Bible teaches baptismal regeneration and salvation. These Protestant writers frankly admit this fact—they take the Catholic position on the issue.
Martin Luther
Sixteenth-Century Founder of Lutheranism
“Q. What gifts or benefits does baptism bestow?
“A. It works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the word and promise of God declare” (Short Catechism 4:2).
Martin Luther
Sixteenth-Century Founder of Lutheranism
“[I]t is solemnly and strictly commanded that we must be baptized or we shall not be saved. . . . To be baptized in God’s name is to be baptized not by men but by God himself. Although it is performed by men’s hands, it is nevertheless truly God’s own act. From this fact everyone can easily conclude that it is of much greater value than the work of any man or saint. . . . Therefore it is sheer wickedness and devilish blasphemy when our ‘new spirits’ [Anabaptists], in order to slander baptism, ignore God’s word and ordinance and consider nothing but the water drawn from the well and then babble, ‘How can a handful of water help the soul?’” (Long Catechism 4).
Martin Luther
Sixteenth-Century Founder of Lutheranism
“Our know-it-alls, the ‘new spirits,’ assert that faith alone saves and that works and external things contribute nothing to this end. We answer: . . . Yes, it must be external so that it can be perceived and grasped and thus brought into the heart, just as the entire gospel is an external, oral proclamation. In short, whatever God effects in us he does through such external ordinances. . . . Hence it follows that whoever rejects baptism rejects God’s word, faith, and Christ, who directs us and binds us to baptism” (ibid.)
Dale Moody
Twentieth-Century Baptist
“A baptismal hymn in Titus 3:4–7 is thelocus classicus on baptism in relation to regeneration . . . Baptism in relation to the whole process of salvation brings further focus on the primacy of faith. Another baptismal hymn found in 1 Peter 3:18–22 does indeed declare that, after the antitype of Noah’s flood, ‘baptism now saves’” (The Word of Truth, 466).
James McClendon, Jr.
Twentieth-Century Baptist
“How can some gallons of water (and some words) make outsiders insiders, beget anew, banish sin, merge our lives with the risen One’s life, transmit God’s Holy Spirit? How can any rite admit, or convert, or identify, or endue?. . . It will not be enough to point out that it is God and not the Christian assembly, God and not the candidate, who does these things, for while in Scripture the believer, the community, Christ, and the Spirit are all depicted as active agents in baptism, Scripture also speaks of the baptismal act itself as effectual (cf. Luke 3:16, 1 Cor. 1:14ff, Acts 2:38, with 1 Pet. 3:21)” (Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 387)
R. Beasley-Murray
Twentieth-Century Baptist
“The rite of baptism is not only God’s appointed way of his either bestowing or confirming the gift of the Holy Spirit (i.e., regeneration) and of our entering into the church of Christ, but it is also the means by which the new Christian testifies to having been born from above and converted to the Lord Jesus Christ” (Born Again: A Biblical and Theological Study of Regeneration, 188).
Howard Ervin
Twentieth-Century Pentecostal
“As Noah and his family were saved through water, so baptism, as the fulfillment of the Noachian type, ‘now saves you’ [1 Pet. 3:21]. . . . The salvific event of baptism involves more than the baptismal confession of faith. It is through the resurrection that God’s saving power is extended to mankind. The convert’s baptismal confession is rendered efficacious through the resurrection of Jesus Christ ‘into whose death and resurrection we were baptized.’ Baptism is, therefore, more than an expression of ‘man’s repentance and/or faith to God’” (Conversion, Initiation and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, 157f).